More sacred than profane?

Kevin Smith, director of Clerks, is back with a bigger budget and a bigger theme - religion.
Dogma infuriated the religious Right in the States, but Smith doesn't know why. He's just a good Catholic boy, he tells Mark Morris

The annual rerelease of It's A Wonderful Life excepted, Christmas movies tend to be a painful business. This year, there is an exception. Dogma may lack carols and reindeer, but it is focused on something rarer in the holiday season: religion. Kevin Smith's new film is the most sincerely Catholic movie since Martin Scorsese's The Last Temptation Of Christ, and in the States it has caused almost as much trouble. So there's something sly about its Boxing Day release date here.

'When I first heard it was coming out at Christmas I thought "Wow, they're just courting disaster, aren't they?''' Smith says. 'But then I realised it's not the US and people don't seem to be as kneejerk. This is a continent that produced Pasolini, for godsakes. Once I realised that, I thought "Christmas is a fine place to open", kind of cheeky. Back home it would have been blasphemous and incendiary.'

Incendiary? The now notorious Dogma is about two fallen angels (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, below) who think they have found a way to sneak back into heaven via a populist bishop's day of forgiveness at a New Jersey church. Unfortunately, if they manage that, it will end the world (this is not a simple film). An angel (Alan Rickman) is sent to coerce a grumpy abortion clinic worker (Linda Fiorentino) into stopping them. Somewhere along the way there's the thirteenth Apostle and Smith's recurring characters, Jay and Silent Bob, and a shit monster. And Alanis Morissette plays God, or at least one of God's guises.

Despite having a fiendish, complex and theological plot, the film manages to be as convulsively funny as Smith's debut Clerks. The film does have some harsh things to say about the Catholic Church, but it's also transparently devout. Kevin Smith is a man obsessed by St Thomas More. Which, of course, the Catholic pressure groups who campaigned against the film long before it was even made were never going to understand. When Disney distanced themselves from the film which had been made by their Miramax subsidiary, Miramax bosses Harvey and Bob Weinstein had to put up their own money before selling it on to an independent distributor. The film was finally released in the US in November, and has done surprisingly good business.

Sitting comfortably on the floor of a big suite at the Dorchester and looking relatively untraumatised, Smith can finally relax. 'Nobody has gotten hurt, that's the key thing. During the seven months before the movie came out, we were receiving lots of mail. And it's all focused at Harvey and Bob, and I'm mentioned in a cursory fashion, which is bizarre - wouldn't you be mad at me most? I wrote it. These guys just distributed it.' But you're not Jewish.

'But I'm not Jewish. You read a lot of anti-semitism and hang your head low, because these are letters coming from Christians. The one that will stay with me forever said: "You Jews better take the money you stole from us and start investing in flak jackets 'cos we're coming in there with shotguns." And you read something like that and what strikes you is "what kind of Christian approach is this?" A Christian is meant to be turn the other cheek. So it was very disconcerting. If someone is going to write a letter like that to the Weinsteins - who aren't the authors of the piece - all it will take is one slightly more intelligent enraged Christian to realise the one we should be mad at is this guy, and that may be the one who doesn't write the letter but shows up in a dark parking lot and blows you away.'

There's no melodrama to this: Smith isn't trying to turn himself into some Rushdie-like martyr: he's just telling the story. 'We couldn't open our mail and all packages had to be turned away but then it quietened down, and by the time the movie came out there was nothing, which I think has something to do with the fact that every review said this movie is not sacrilegious. The reviews that were bad just said 'it's not blasphemous, just not good!''

This wasn't meant to happen to Kevin Smith. He is no Spike Lee, not a natural polemicist. He was the Clerks guy, the convenience store assistant who made visually primitive films about bored guys discussing whether it was possible to give yourself a blow job. The man whose second film, the ill-fated and underrated Mallrats, is a homage to Pretty In Pink director John Hughes. Whose third film, Chasing Amy, was about whether a man can cope with his girlfriend's sexual history. A man whose films are all based in the New Jersey suburbs he came from and in which he defiantly still lives; the comics geek who bought his town's comic shop.

He's not a born troublemaker, and you can tell he was never out to upset people. He's not like that: in the flesh (unlike his screen persona Silent Bob) he's talkative, knowledgeable, easy to warm to. Like a lot of average modern American Catholics, he doesn't buy the church line on abortion and homosexuality and divorce. The difference is, the others haven't made a film with the line 'Mary having a virgin birth - now, that's a leap of faith. But a married couple never getting it on? That's suspension of disbelief' (see Mark 6:3 for further details).

In the middle of the Dogma storm, Smith got married - on George Lucas's Skywalker Ranch ('It's not like I was looking around at statues of Jesus and Mary, I was looking at statues of Boba Fett!') - and had a baby. Which is interesting, because in both his films and interviews he used to be of the opinion that men are biologically incapable of being faithful: if sex is on offer, men take it. What does his wife think?

He laughs. 'The key is to marry someone who is always offering. If you are married to someone who is constantly giving it up and you run into someone who is like "Hey, I'd like to give it up', you go 'I've got nothing for you, I just unloaded back home, so I'm sorry". I always apply this to the other person, so I'm like, "We better fuck because we're going out into the real world soon and someone might want to fuck us and we'd have to give in because we haven't fucked today". Which is kind of a silly approach, but it seems to work. And it helps to be with somebody that - like"Wow! Could anyone be better than you in the next 24 hours? No! Nobody!" And also, I don't want to be on the receiving end. And marriage ups the ante considerably: I'm not the divorcing kind.'

Then there is the baby, which he says has put an end to his irresponsibility. And so when he says the next film isn't written yet, you start to worry. Will the domesticated Kevin Smith, reeling from the Dogma fallout, abandon the cinematic dick joke? Make family movies? Probably not, because the stark fate of one of his heroes haunts him. 'This better not yield any baby movies in me. Because that seemed to be what happened to John Hughes, who went from making these great movies about teenagers to the cast getting younger and younger to finally just having a baby crawling around and boy, I don't want to be that guy.' And somehow, you know he won't.

Bad Lieutenant (Abel Ferrara, 1992) 'I was still working at Quick Stop, before I made Clerks. Me and my friend went up to New York after work. The first thing you're struck by is Harvey Keitel's dick: yet another movie where you see Harvey Keitel's piece. There is some of that Catholic iconography, but what I remember most is leaving and seeing our car had been ransacked. I had never been robbed before: someone popped the lock on my friend's trunk and took my bag. One of the notebooks had the initial pages of Clerks in it. I had to start from scratch. So when I think of Bad Lieutenant I think of getting robbed.'

Jesus Of Montreal (Denys Arcand, 1989) 'Wonderful movie, really powerful. That was where I was first introduced to alternative theories of Christ. In the movie they present the Passion Play with current data as regards to Christ - they wind up telling stories about how Christ could have been the son of a centurion and lacked the beard. It ends unsatisfactorily: the guy just dies on a subway. But it was good to see a movie where a guy becomes so involved with playing a character that he becomes that character in some way: I've yet to see an actor make that kind of commitment.'

The Life Of Brian (Terry Jones, 1979) 'If I was any less reverent, I would have attempted something like The Life Of Brian. But I didn't have the benefit of not being reverent to the subject matter, so the irreverency level hits a wall at some point. Those guys can go the full nine and completely lambast the church and faith and people who are religious, and that'sbrilliant. Me, I couldn't go that far. I can look at things and go "that's weird, that's dumb" but I still want to believe, so I'm hampered to a certain degree. Life Of Brian made the most honest statement about fanaticism that I've yet to see.'

The Mission (Roland Joffe, 1986) 'I've still not seen it from beginning to end. I remember him going over the falls on that cross, but that's all. It didn't appeal to me all that much because it's all visual, not a lot of dialogue, and I am the dialogue guy. So when there's a lot of pretty things happening and not a lot being said, I'm usually tuning out.'

The Last Temptation Of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988) 'One of my favourite films, and a movie I felt played like a commercial for faith. Ironically, it's a movie that I saw and was going 'Where's the controversy?' I was saying, "It's a movie that could've brought people back to church." I thought the guys objecting to it shot themselves in the foot. The only thing you heard about it was that it was the movie where Christ had sex. Then you see the movie, and Christ is on the cross and he has a delusion about what it would have been like if he didn't have to die on the cross, and gets married and has sex and has children and then he wakes up and dies anyway. It's not about Christ having sex.'

A Man For All Seasons (Fred Zinnemann, 1966) 'Love that movie! Thomas More is my favourite saint: I took my confirmation name from him. It's one of those movies where I go "Why do I always get the piss taken out of for lack of visual style?" Fred Zinneman just did a series of static wide shots. But I'm the guy "who doesn't know how to work as a director". Very moving and powerful. More is such a role model: I wonder if I could stand up and go 'I chose Rome!'